5 Months On The Keto Diet: My Final Thoughts

So I decided to give the ketogenic diet a good 5 months of testing to see if it was going to work for me.

So what did I think?

Did I lose weight?

Did I heal?

Did I enjoy the food?

Did I find it easy?

Why are most people doing keto diets the unhealthy way?

Find out my thoughts on the ketogenic diet in this video where I reveal exactly what I thought of this new trendy diet.

Today I am sharing my five months on a ketogenic diet and my final thoughts.

Why did I go on a ketogenic diet in the first place?

Well, this was because I was sick with chronic fatigue syndrome.

I started reading some chronic fatigue syndrome books, and I didn’t go back to the diet that I had been on the previous times.

It was because I had an infection in my implant and I was a little bit worried that too much sugar would cause damage to my teeth and would not make my infection heal and would prevent it or would cause further infections in the future.

And I forgot everything I learned, basically, about good health and started to panic and think, “Oh my goodness, what am I gonna do now? I can’t eat fruit, I can’t do this, I can’t do that…”

So I started reading books on chronic fatigue syndrome and everywhere I seemed to read people were pointing to the ketogenic diet.

It is definitely in fashion at the moment. It’s a trendy thing to do and it seems to be everywhere and I thought, “Well, maybe it’s worth giving it a go, lots of people seem to be getting good results with healing on the ketogenic diet, so I’ll give it a go.”

Did I enjoy the food?

And I’ve got to say, at the start I did actually enjoy the food.

I really enjoyed eating high fat plant food.

I’m not really a fan of meat, I just don’t really like eating it, so I would tend to just have one meal a day that was based on meat and the other meals had a lot of plant-based fat in them. At the start I did really enjoy the plant-based fat, but after a couple of months of eating this way I’ve got to say that I just could barely stomach the food anymore.

It was like, my body was just sending me signals that this is not what you want to be doing.

And I ignored it and I just kept on eating this fat all the time, and my body was craving lighter foods.

Fruit!

I ignored it, I thought “I can’t eat too much fruit, it will not be good for my teeth”, and I just carried on with the ketogenic diet.

So, at the end I just got so, so, sick of the food. I just couldn’t stomach anymore fat, to be honest with you.

What did I struggle with on the ketogenic diet?

There’s actually quite a few things that I struggled with, and no diet is perfect, there’ll always be pros and cons of every diet, and this is what I struggled with with the ketogenic diet.

First of all, it’s very, very complicated and I had bought all kinds of gadgets and gizmos and ketogenic blood metres and strips telling me whether or not I was in ketosis (and that’s supposedly very important).

If you’re not in ketosis, then you’re a big failure on the ketogenic diet.

I’m being a big melodramatic, because a lot of people who do it in a healthy way would say that actually the numbers don’t matter so much, but most people on the ketogenic diet say, “You know, you have to stay in ketosis otherwise you’re not going to start burning fat as fuel and that’s our primary aim which is to switch from burning sugar as fuel to burning fat as fuel. And you’re only going to feel better, lose, weight, heal and whatever it is you’re trying to do on the ketogenic diet. You’ll only be able to do that when you’re in ketosis and that means making sure that you hardly eat any carbs at all so that you can get into ketosis. And then you’ve got to buy all these monitors to make sure that you’re in ketosis, because what’s the point in going through all the effort to stick to a strict diet if you’re not going to be in ketosis?”

So you buy all these expensive metres as well, and I must admit that I did too.

And I bought some of these keto oils too and I was taking those, and I did get into ketosis even though I was eating quite a lot of carbs for a keto diet because I could not give up my vegetables and a lot of people say that you’ve got to go really low carb and give up your vegetables, or give up most of your vegetables to stay very low carb and I just refused to do that because I know how healing plant food is for your body.

Another thing that I found really hard is that it’s not flexible at all.

I mean, it is a very strict and a very extreme diet.

When I was on the raw food diet that was also a very extreme, strict diet and I did struggle in the same way to eat out and be sociable.

I found the raw food diet slightly easier because the food was much more simple.

Like, you could tell somebody I just need a big plate of fruit, or, you know, I just need a salad and maybe a couple of bananas, and most people understand that. You can go to a restaurant and you can ask for that type of food and it’s easier to stick to a raw food diet and there are raw food restaurants or you can go to a vegan restaurant, you can usually find raw food.

So you can go to a supermarket or store and buy, plates of fruit, fruit already chopped up, you can buy grapes, bananas or whatever it is you want to buy in a hurry on a raw food diet. Whereas on a ketogenic diet I just did not have a clue what to buy, so I had to be even more organised than I ever was.

And travelling is completely out of the question on a ketogenic diet as far as I’m concerned because I didn’t eat dairy, because I’m intolerant to dairy, so that ruled out a big food group in the ketogenic diet and I’m not so keen on meat either, and when I do eat meat it was pasture raised meat and you can’t usually buy that in standard stores or restaurants. But even if I did order, you know like a big slab of meat, I wouldn’t have liked it because I used to hide my meat in sauces and stuff since it’s the only way I could tolerate eating it.

I tried going out and just ordering a slab of meat and I just took one look at it and I just couldn’t eat any of it, I couldn’t stomach the thought of it, it just looked disgusting.

So that was a big fail, the sociable aspects, unless I took my own food with me. I tended to make dips out of nuts and take some cucumbers (which probably is too high carbs), and that was very difficult was the social aspect of it.

Another problem was that I was just craving fruit all the time.

I went to see a naturopath and she asked me “Have you got any cravings?”.

And I said “Just watermelon, I’m dreaming of watermelon night and day.”

And I was trying to put it to the back of my mind, but what I’ve come to learn is if you are craving junk food, then that’s an addiction, it’s not your body trying to tell you that you need junk food in your life, you need something different to junk food because nobody needs junk food. But if you’re craving something natural especially like fruit and vegetables, then it usually is a sign that your body needs that so I should’ve listened to my body and I should’ve eaten some watermelon, because that’s probably exactly what my body needed.

And another problem is I tried to make Green Thickies, which are my complete meal green smoothies, for my family and I would put lots of coconut oil and nuts and avocado, mainly kind of plant-based fats, and a small portion of berries, like blueberries or strawberries, and maybe some stevia to sweeten it up and I didn’t mind them, I thought they were okay.

They weren’t absolutely delicious or the nicest thing I’ve ever tasted, unlike my normal green thickie recipes that are really sweet and nice because they’ve got loads of fruit in them. So I was sort of missing my normal green thickie recipes, and my kids just really wouldn’t eat them.

They ate one of them, I think, and then they just wouldn’t eat the rest of them at all, they just refused them. But when I started making my normal recipes again they started eating them again. So I’m really happy that now my kids are eating fruit again and before they were not really drinking my green thickies, so they weren’t getting the leafy greens or any of the other goodness that was in the Green Thickies as well.

Another thing I found with the ketogenic diet is that I was having to buy lots of very expensive products.

Fat is very expensive, especially when you want it to come from a healthy source.

So everything’s organic, everything’s pasteurised, everything is more expensive and especially fats and expensive oils that I was going through very, very quickly.

I was buying loads more coconut oils than I usually would and it was all adding up, because it is more expensive than anything else.

I was buying lots of expensive sweeteners like erythritol and making things like, because I was craving sugar so badly (probably because of the fruit that I was craving), I was making things like these homemade chocolates, but healthy ones, just sweetened with sugar or erythritol and the cacao butter, and all that was quite expensive as well.

Another problem was that I was still having ongoing health problems and it just didn’t seem to really get that much better.

The only slight improvement I noticed was when I started drinking this liquid vitamin (and I’ll probably do another video just on that vitamin but I will link to it on this blog post), called Liquid Gold Vitamin. It’s a drink and it’s based on whole foods so it’s all whole foods, plant-based ingredients.

When I started drinking that I did notice a slight improvement every single day. And that was the only thing I noticed an improvement on. The rest of the time I was just sluggish, exhausted, I still had the chronic fatigue (my health problem), my digestion was really, really awful and I was having brain fog and just wasn’t feeling very good at all.

When I went to a hypnotherapist who said “You’re now healed of chronic fatigue.”. And I did feel like my chronic fatigue went, but I still felt fatigued like a normal person, like somebody, you know, I mean maybe you’re the same but all your friends might say to you “Oh I’m so tired, I’m so tired.” And that was a kind of normal, like, you can drag yourself through the day because you have to, not like chronic fatigue where you literally can’t move. But you’re tired and you can drag yourself through the day but you don’t feel good, you don’t feel right, you don’t feel energetic, you don’t feel like, happy or full of life. I just didn’t feel any of that at all!

I did not feel right, and I thought, “What is happening here?”. Because, I’ve stuck to this strict diet, a gluten free diet and strict whole natural food for five months now, and in the past when I’ve stuck to very strict diets it’s been a minimum of one month to a maximum of three months until I was completely back to full boundless energy, life, vitality and feeling myself. But I just wasn’t feeling that after five months so I just thought that something’s not right here, I’m just still feeling wiped out and I’ve got problems with my cycle and everything gets worse at different times of the month and I just wasn’t feeling right at all.

And I thought, “I don’t know, I just don’t think this diet is for me.”

So a question you might be asking me is…

Did I lose any weight on the keto diet?

Because that’s what most people go on the keto diet for, and the answer is no!

It stayed pretty much the same. It went slightly up; few pounds up, few pounds down, up, down, up, down, as it usually does, and no I didn’t lose any weight.

And I wasn’t trying to lose weight because I was so sick so I needed to keep my energy levels up.

And I had very, very low blood sugar for a few months on the diet and I think that was just because I was feeling so sick I was having to eat every few hours and that wasn’t like me at all before that. I could manage to go from one meal to another before I went on the keto diet and I didn’t have any blood sugar levels before I got sick, so I just wasn’t thinking about weight loss at all, I was just trying to keep my blood sugar levels stable.

So again no, the answer is I didn’t lose weight!

It didn’t naturally fall off, I just ate until I was full up and I didn’t eat anymore. I didn’t feel like I needed to eat more because I wasn’t, you know, it’s hard to overdose on fat so, well, I found it is anyway. So I just stopped when I was full up, and no, I didn’t lose any weight.

And for me, would I recommend keto to my clients or to my friends?

And the answer now is probably no, but it depends on what else you’ve tried first.

I think most people unfortunately do keto completely unhealthily and that’s the reason why I wouldn’t recommend it because most sources out there are based on eating junk food, basically, in my opinion just loads of dairy, loads of junk food, meats, and that to me is just not a sustainable healthy diet and yes you might lose weight in the short term but there’s plenty other ways to lose weight and plenty other easy ways to lose weight, so why choose that method?

Just because you like the food, probably, because everybody likes to make a pizza just out of cheese for the base, and then more cheese on top and then some meat on top of that, so, you know, why wouldn’t you want to eat like that if that’s the way you normally eat?

So it probably appeals to people because you don’t have to move away from so much junk food if you do it the standard way, but I would say that I just wouldn’t recommend doing it that way at all.

Now there’s a couple of people who do it in a very healthy way, and one of them is Leanne Vogel. If you want to get her resources you can go here.

And I really like her approach because she uses whole foods in her ketogenic diets and I really enjoyed her recipes.

They include vegetables, they don’t include dairy, the meat is from healthy sources, she cares about organic and healthy forms of oils and things, so I really like her approach to the ketogenic diet.

But most people are leading you up the garden path when it comes to the ketogenic diet because I just don’t think that it’s generally very healthy unfortunately.

The advice that I would give to anybody who is sick and considering a diet for health reasons is, ‘listen to your body.’ Try different things and listen to your body and see how you feel on different diets, because I know that my body wants fruit. It’s been sending me that message for a long time and it was my own fault, I didn’t remember how good I felt, I didn’t do enough research to know that the teeth problem didn’t have to be an issue and I’ll do a different video on that.

But if you eat enough leafy greens, which I do because obviously I keep drinking my green thickies which have loads of leafy greens in them, so if you eat enough leafy greens you get enough minerals, you get loads of calcium, and your teeth are protected and the fruit is actually good for your teeth as well.

You should not brush your teeth straight after fruit meals so that you don’t wear away the enamel, and I’ve done videos on protecting your teeth when you drink smoothies, so go and look at those on my YouTube channel.

So for me, I listened to my body and my body was screaming out for me to eat fruit, and I blocked it and blocked it and blocked it and then I prayed and I said, “God, tell me which diet is right for me because I am so sick of this, I’m so sick of feeling this bad, I just want to get my life back,” and he said, “You already know what diet is right for you and you’re just not listening, you forgot it, and you’re going off on the latest fads because you’ve been brainwashed and told that fruit is bad for you.”

And it’s not!

So that is my lesson, and if you ever see me posting another video that says I am trying a new diet then stop me and say, “Stop it, you know what’s good for you, just stay with what you know works for you because you’ve proven it three times now in a row, for long periods of time, that high fruit works for you.”

So just listen to your body, try different things, pray about it, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet because it’s not always what’s right for you, but I think leafy greens are definitely right for everybody without a doubt, I just can’t imagine why anybody would want to not include leafy greens in their diet and in my opinion fruit too, but a lot of people’s mindset will stop them from eating fruit, unfortunately, and you know after a couple months of eating keto, even my meat loving husband was saying to me, “I think I might go vegetarian, maybe I’ll actually go vegan,” and that was just a complete shock to me. I never thought I would hear those words coming out of his mouth, and lately I have been making some plant-based meals and I’ve moved away from the fat and we’ve all been loving it.

Everyone has been so enjoying this food because I think we just had so much fat that we just couldn’t cope with it anymore.

So that is my one and only experiment with the ketogenic diet, and hopefully the final episode when it comes to the ketogenic diet.

Never say never, because you never know, I might change my mind, I tend to do that, but at the moment I don’t plan to ever go back to the ketogenic diet, so let me know what your thoughts are.

Have you tried it, do you not want to ever try it, what kind of diet is right for you?

Let me know in the comments.

If you want to share this message with other people who may be struggling with their health and, you know, health problems please share this video, like this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

And if you want to get the diet that has worked for me, that will work for me, that I always keep going back to time and time again, I created my own meal plan, so I was a bit silly not to follow my own meal plans, but if you want to know what I’m doing now then you can get a FREE month of meal plans by going here to The Leaf System.

That is my meal plan and my whole system there that I’m going straight back to.

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